GW2: official statement on Release-Questions

well there are a lot of new people here fearing the worst. There are a few misconceptions and there is a official statement from Eric Flannum (Lead Designer) about all this:

Originally Posted by Eric Flannum

I wanted to clear up some misconceptions that the way I worded things in the interview may have caused as well as clarify some points that I see people commenting on frequently elsewhere on the boards.

"ArenaNet can't make a perfect game so their iteration process will only result in the game never shipping!"

There are a lot of variations on this sort of statement but the answer to it is pretty simple. Guild Wars 2 is not going to be a perfect game, no game can ever be perfect. The purpose of iterating on a feature is never to make it "perfect" but rather to raise it above mediocre to either good or great. This is especially true if you're doing something that you haven't seen done well before since you have no prior examples to consider when you're trying to anticipate problems. We know the game isn't going to be perfect and we've never stated that as a goal, what we have said is that we want to release a great game and more importantly a complete and polished game.

"There are going to be bugs when they release it so why not just release it now and fix the bugs later?"

In the current western gaming market a game has one chance to find it's audience and that chance occurs right when it releases. The examples of games that have released with huge problems and then stabilized and gained a following after being fixed are few and far between. On the other hand the examples of games that released with a lot of potential, made a bad first impression and have since been relegated to a small audience or have even been shut down are easy to point to. We've all seen where releasing unfinished gets a game and none of us want Guild Wars 2 to fail because it was released before it was finished.

"If the ArenaNet devs were smarter/better/more experienced they wouldn't make so many mistakes and have to iterate so often."

I'll be the first to admit that we make our fair share of mistakes (many of which I am personally responsible for). If you look at the kinds of things that we have iterated on or changed over the course of development however you'll see that almost all of our core ideas remain intact. What we've largely done is iterate on the details which is always going to happen in any game development process. A design document should be all about sketching out the feel and high level goals of the game and not about providing minute details because all games but especially MMO's are extremely complicated projects with a lot of moving parts and nobody I've ever met is capable of anticipating how all of those things will react to each other. Again, this is especially true if you're trying to do new things.

"The game looks so done. Why won't they just let us play it?"

The things we've shown you at trade shows have indeed been pretty polished but it's important to consider the things that you haven't seen or that we haven't talked about. Now, don't get me wrong I'm not saying that the things you've seen are the only things that have been worked on. For example, out of all of our content types dungeons are probably the farthest along in overall development right now. We haven't shown them at any shows because we don't think a crowded show is a good place to show off content that is supposed to be for organized and coordinated groups. All that being said we're definitely getting closer, we'll be revealing the final profession before the end of the year, and we've got a few other things to talk about in the coming weeks as well.

"They must have a date they're shooting for. Why won't they just tell us?"

We do have internal dates and deadlines, lots of them. We don't tell you about them because quite frankly even if we put a disclaimer on things and told you that it was only a "rough date" or an "estimated release" or something like that, we'd be held to it and accused of lying if we didn't make that date. It would put pressure on us to release something before it was ready and as I talked about earlier we really don't want to do that.

I hope that this helps you understand where we're at a little bit better

yeah the guys are great, looking podcasts and interviews they really can explain why they do certain things and I'm happy that their philosophies are priority 1 in the development process. Nearly every change from the classical approach to mmos can be brought in connection with their philosophy.

I understand that a lot of people here don't understand the long development process, but think of it: They aren't copying classic mmos, they build up on things they learned from GW1 and their goal is that people have fun playing together. This simple fact isn't fully possible in the games we have played so far for a long time. (killstealing, lootstealing, dependencies on tanks and healers, breaking content with too good gear, etc. etc)

have fun playing together. This simple fact isn't fully possible in the games we have played so far for a long time. (killstealing, lootstealing, dependencies on tanks and healers, breaking content with too good gear, etc. etc)

This
That this simple fact has taken years for most people to understand is sad. That GW2 is doing something about it is amazing. It's like combinging how great old single player RPGs were with the best points of MMOs.